Yeltsin Foes Scrap Drive To Oust Him

April 03, 1991|By New York Times News Service.

MOSCOW — The Communist apparatus retreated Tuesday from its attempt to bring down Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian republic, after a week of hardball politics that seemed only to have increased his popularity in relation to that of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.

While the political challenge to Yeltsin`s authority was being scrapped in the parliament of the Russian republic, the largest and most powerful of the nation`s 15 constituent republics, the latest deficit figures at the national treasury were announced.

Officials held the Russian republic`s separatist politics, championed by Yeltsin, mainly responsible for a shortfall of more than 20 billion rubles in national tax revenue that was withheld in the first two months of this year.

Late last year, the Russian republic said it would limit its

contributions to the national budget, which normally amount to about half the payments to the national till, and a handful of other republics followed suit. In the Russian republic`s parliament Tuesday, Ivan Polozkov, a Yeltsin antagonist and leader of the Russian Communist Party, sought to put a statesman`s edge on the Communist machine`s retreat: ``The situation in Russia is bad, and it is our duty to stop the decline in all spheres of life.``

``I believe this is not the moment to change the leadership,`` Polozkov said, trying to end the challenge started when the legislature`s hard-line wing called for a meeting to challenge Yeltsin in an effort to force him from office.

On the opening day of the session last Thursday, about 100,000 people rallied in Moscow in support of Yeltsin, despite a Kremlin order banning demonstrations in the capital.

The demonstration produced widespread criticism of Gorbachev, and since then the Russian parliament has failed to place on its agenda a vote on the Yeltsin issue. Tuesday again, the hard-liners could not get enough votes to put the issue on the ballot.

At least one newspaper in Moscow described the events of the last week as further evidence of the rapid decline of Gorbachev`s fortunes. Kommersant, an important independent paper, described the week as ``Gorbachev`s Waterloo.``

``The gunslinger has no bullets,`` the business weekly declared of the Soviet leader on its front page, in a tone of summary disrespect that is becoming commonplace among the democratic opposition, hard-line Communists and an ever larger part of the public.

``Now we are on the verge of admitting that Gorbachev has been just another of our exaggerations,`` it declared in a two-page essay that read like a political epitaph. It accused him of leading ``a relapse into monarchist thinking,`` the idea that he is indispensable in a crisis he has been unable to ease.